(Continuing) preliminary thoughts on space art, looking for thoughts, models, ideas to frame a useful aesthetic.

 The aesthetic pressure of outer space provokes a confrontation with scale, one that demands an artistic response within a new media.  I'm starting with thinking of scale  in terms of duration (a billion years or a fleeting moment), size (nano sculpture or work that moves planets) and age (for the distant future from the immeasurable past).

The new media is the imagination, by which I mean the psychic space descibed by Jung. Terrence McKenna quotes it this way:

"Though we know from experience that psychic processes are related to material ones, we are not in a position to say in what this relationship consists, or how it is possible at all. Precisely because the psyche and the physical are mutually dependent it has often been conjectured that they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience."

 The art work exists as a physical object, but it also carries with it an accumulation of culture, idiosyncracy, intentions and unexpected consequences.     We can talk about this accumulation as a swarm of memes.  Memes  will propagate through characteristic behavior that can be described using the language of genetics:  variation, mutation, inheritance, competition. 

If the physical object is now designed for an environment off-earth where it will remain unchanged for a billion years, then the physical object becomes an attractor for meaning more than it remains an object of form.  If the art is constructed as a gesture that lasts a nano-second, or one that takes place in the electromagnetic spectrum invisible to our senses - what is happening there? 

What's happening is that we are constructing an artistic gesture in the medium of imagination - the epiphenomena of art thrown into relief -  in response to a confrontation with scale.